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On speaking terms: spirituality and sensuality in the tradition of modern black female intellectualism

ON SPEAKING TERMS:
SPIRITUALITY AND SENSUALITY
IN THE TRADITION OF MODERN BLACK FEMALE INTELLECTUALISM
by
Shakira C. Holt
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2009
Copyright 2009 Shakira C. Holt

“On Speaking Terms: Spirituality and Sensuality in the Tradition of Modern Black Female Intellectualism” is an interdisciplinary womanist and feminist project which centers the issue of class as it relates to the intellectual life of U.S. black women. Questions at the heart of this study are: Who gets to be an intellectual? Why do elite black women continue to carry the representation of black female intellectuals? What is gained when we choose to view non-elite black women as intellectuals? This project therefore represents my attempt to attend critically to those strands of black female intellection which have proven easily absorbed into traditional discourses on intellectualism, such as literature, as well as those, coming from non-elite sources, which pose problems to traditional class-based notions of the intellectual. Moreover, I frame the Western tension between the spiritual and the sensual as the key creative force in modern black women's intellectualism.; Fixing a critical eye on such sites as the cultural and religious West African-derived practice of shouting, the understudied short stories of Marita Bonner, novels by Ann Petry (Country Place), Zora Neale Hurston (Seraph on the Suwanee), Dorothy West (The Living is Easy), and Gwendolyn Brooks (Maud Martha), and the lives, songs, and performances of three of African American sacred music’s most important figures, Ruth “Baby Sis” Davis, Clara Ward, and Dorothy Love Coates, I find room to seat around a common table middle-class black women intellectuals with their working-class sisters. My fundamental argument is that working-class black women have been just as deeply intellectual as their elite writing counterparts, and should be brought, at last, into the formal study of the modern black female intellectual. Presenting a unique and important archive of material, this dissertation project enacts the reconciliation of middle- and working-class black women within the context of modern black intellectualism.

ON SPEAKING TERMS:
SPIRITUALITY AND SENSUALITY
IN THE TRADITION OF MODERN BLACK FEMALE INTELLECTUALISM
by
Shakira C. Holt
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2009
Copyright 2009 Shakira C. Holt